In the sixth and final blog in our series cutting through the metaverse hype, we’re looking at the changes that the metaverse will bring for customer experience teams. Paul Danter, Co-CEO, Digital Content Services, who kicked off our series a few weeks back, is wrapping it up today by looking at what the future holds for the kind of setup, skills and people you’ll need your CX team to offer.
In the previous metaverse blog in our series, we looked at what the metaverse could mean for customer experience, having already looked at what’s in store for brands and their customers. But what about the teams that brands will need to assemble to be able to deliver leading-edge CX?
It goes without saying that to deliver CX in metaversal spaces your technology platform is going to need to be robust and resilient. Just as crucial as bandwidth, IT platform choice and processing power though, are the people you’ll need to provide your customer experience.
At Webhelp we partner with The Sandbox, a virtual world where players can build, own, and monetize their gaming experiences in the Ethereum blockchain, on an ambassador program that sees our team supporting and engaging users in The Sandbox. So we’ve got a frontline view on the kind of people and skills required and in this blog we’ll share some of the learnings we’ve made.
The opportunities for people
Our CX ambassadors all have competencies in building metaverse experiences. A lot of them have backgrounds in gaming, which means they’re already used to metaversal environments and experiences, as well as user-generated content: creating their own NFTs, avatars, skins and more. These are people who are natives of the environment and understand its unique potential rewards. That has knock-on effects on the way we train them, the way we onboard them and the way that we define roles.
The metaverse can also provide a space to open the door to underrepresented and marginalized groups, giving them access to training, skills and capabilities to work in these new digital spaces. Initiatives like impact sourcing can play a part here, upskilling people into the jobs of tomorrow.
The roles you’ll need
We’ve already looked in this series at the evolving, demanding nature of customer experience in the metaverse. In this next section, we’ll start to look at what the roles might look like. This is definitely a work in progress because we’re all iterating these spaces together in real-time. But at Webhelp, we have identified three main areas in the metaverse ecosystem, where we think there are clearly identified roles for CX support, each a response to specific pain points.
Caregivers for the community
First of all, how do we help to organize the community while respecting the concept and the principle of that community? The scope we’ve identified is around supporting the communities through the role of caregivers, who help to create activation and trust and safety within.
Caregivers help to regulate customer behaviors as well as monitor user-generated content and help to manage the complexity associated with the scale of activity and content created across micro-communities that exist within the metaverse. All in all – they help the community function properly and safely.
They do this by ensuring visibility, consistency, and safety in the metaverse and across social media platforms. In a shared metaversal space – a community-regulated environment – it’s about finding the balance. Between saying, on the one hand, this space isn’t meant to have a lot of rules imposed by external players, but on the other, needing the rules that do exist to be followed, to ensure the safety of everyone. These are the people who help you manage customers’ behaviors so that everybody feels safe in that environment, both in-world and outside on social media.
Guardians of the platform, its creators and assets
Guardians are there to help you ensure the integrity of your platform, its digital assets and more. This role is there just as much to help look after creators too – protecting them from scammers for example – as it is to ensure the security of transactions and the platform itself. Where they are creating assets such as NFTs for example, there needs to be copyright protection in place.
These are the kind of issues we discuss with brands that are looking for a presence in the Metaverse. This guardianship role is going to be absolutely key in creating safe, secure spaces for brands and creators to buy and sell, particularly as Play 2 Earn crypto games continue to grow in popularity.
Teachers for the CX support challenges
The third and final type of role we’re seeing is really around CX support and helping users orientate themselves in a new world. While human beings respond pretty much the same depending on whether they are in the metaverse or in the real world, there are differences too in the support that they need.
So we need to adapt to the behaviors of users in the metaverse, where they need support that’s more personalized, where expectations in terms of interactions might be different. So the skills of these people might need to be different as well. This role is essential to help activate and engage new users in the metaverse, reaching out to them if they have queries and issues. Teachers to help mesh brand consistency across real-world brand experiences and metaverse experiences.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our metaverse blog series and you can find all our blogs here. In the meantime, you can find out more about our metaverse solutions, or talk to us about any aspect of the metaverse, by reaching out below.
